Sign California Banking Notice To Quit Fast

Industry sign banking california notice to quit fast

welcome to today's episode of the better podcast i'm nicholas ayers i'm preston schmidly on a delay and today we have jason cass from the great state the land of lincoln illinois we are going to start on our mark ready mark [Music] hey yo until this is flavorflame in the building for the better agency nicholas wants everyone to know how they need to listen to the truth that nick impression is giving them flavorflame got me all out right now you heard me so hold it down and keep making it a better agency jason cass welcome to the better podcast what's up dude now you are kind of the uh you're the pioneer you're the you're the you're the big kahuna when it comes to podcasting you were the the first person i think to really have i don't is is there anybody who started a podcast when you started a podcast there probably was i was just thinking about this the other day there probably was and i think if you ask hanley i think he would probably say his started first but i really don't know who's did but his hasn't been consistent like yours has been consistent yeah mr consistency here that is the last thing that you would ever associate with jason cass but that is a true statement right there but oh yeah you haven't had any i mean he's had probably different iterations but you have the same thing yeah and i added so it was agents influence and now it's agency intelligence two different podcasts one speaking to people outside the agency agency intelligence speaks to people just in the agency yeah now i think you're an interesting person to have on the better podcast i think you're an interesting voice in our industry so i want to i want to fire off a question to you that i think is kind of the 30 000 foot view question i'm just kind of curious on your perspective of this but as you see where the insurance industry is in 2021 right we're recording this in 2020 but that's going to come out likely if not at the end of this year but forecasting here where do you see the independent insurance industry uh or do you see it as a distribution channel here in the next 12 24 36 months what is your what is your forecast for our industry okay that's a great question first of all um because i have done podcasting a long time it would be of your best interest to put me as soon as you can because then it's gonna start building up subscribers and then it'll help the rest of the year i'm just trying to tell you fair enough you know if we're going to take advice from anybody it might as well be the great jason cass the next 24 to 36 months actually are going to be um a lot like they are right now i think we're living in this time i've been i've said this uh uh the other day but heck that podcast won't be out for a while say right now that i believe like a d and b c right before and after after christ i believe looking back in the 90s and then the 2000s early 10s i believe we're going to look 500 to 1000 years you're gonna look back and go holy cow right then that's when it happened like you can see before 1995 when they had to make their own decisions on their own and then there's after 1995 when machines started helping us make decisions and started living that's going to be the separation time why do i say that because we're kind of like um we're like zig ziglar says if you take a a boil a frog and drop them in water they'll jump right out but if you leave them in the water and it's um slightly warm and you turn it up real slowly they'll cook themselves to death the reason is is right now we're not cooking ourselves to death but we don't really realize that the water is getting really really hot so i say that to say that in 24 to 36 months we're gonna still kind of feel like a lot of things are just um moving fast i have to say that in 2010 i mean from 2010 to 20 i'm going to say 18 from 2018 to 2 the last two years have moved those prior 10. i mean they moved so much faster it's been unbelievable behavioral data some of the stuff that you know about machines are actually starting to work together better agency is having conversations with ams systems i know that seems simple and you mean everybody maybe who's watching maybe like well nick and preston they need to get get going faster no and five years ago they weren't even having that conversation because the carriers were like no nick no not preston we're not doing that guys i mean no api most people didn't even know what that is you know so to answer that question i think you're going to see a lot of what we see right now we're going to see a lot of miss systems that are going to start working together and they're going to be forced to because of the data transfer that's needed so okay so systems are going to start working together there's going to be a lot more connectivity what would be your suggestion to the independent agent who's out there whether they're in california washington florida texas maine wherever what would be your suggestion suggestion to them in order to prep or in order to get ready or to start that process what what do they need to do well that's that is a great question and there's a lot of answers thank you you know it happens i only ask great questions yeah when you ask a lot every once in a while one of them's gonna stick man so anyways here's here's the deal everybody's got their own thing i hear my boy uh bogus hansel says it all the time about ams systems use the one that's best for you right and in this situation use the scenario that's best for you because there's going to be a lot of different options that you can choose but data transfer is going to be the separator data transfer is going to be the difference of how you are going to keep and retain good employees right because me by knowing the data of my employees is going to allow me to be able to create a better experience for internal and external of my office now when i start trying to create a better experience using data what's going to happen is i'm going to be able to pay the best and the people who are really bad in my office are going to show through because the data's going to prove it and they're going to leave my office and the people who are losing the good talent to me because i'm finding the people who are data miners and that could go a million different ways that's going to help the talent i say this a lot it won't be the customer that puts you out of business it's going to be your own staff in your own company that's going to put you out of business because you've got to be able to evolve in that data is going to help me be able to out market better out market people better because i'm going to be able to make better decisions and know when people are trying to access data or whenever they're needing something or whenever they have a problem and they need a solution we're going to be able to be there sometimes it's just not what people are expecting but it's what they're unexpecting i think this is huge being able to know what people need before they know what they need that's a ginormous piece of thing that can happen so the first thing that you can do is we've got to start cleaning up our data and we've got to start understanding what our data looks like one of the things that we've done is we've transferred from qq over to salesforce and we're on the neon thing you have um you have many other agencies coming home from epic applied uh vertifor easy links and there's one thing i'm starting to see the reason why no one can get their data to work in their management system guys is because no one has the data in there correctly and duh jason whoa that's a big moment no no no the ams companies don't even know how the data should go in there because when you pull the data out and you put it into some kind of structure that helps you get the reports and helps you line out the things you need all of a sudden you'll start realizing like wow no one told me that that was supposed to go there i'm talking big time agencies who have spent thousands of dollars on data and have the people and the smarts it just wasn't done correctly and so all that stuff i mean there's just i mean it's a perfect storm right now and i mean it's a tough question answered or a question to answer but just remember this data data is going to change everything i can bring it into every conversation and every question you ask well i think i think the the the a lot of agents you know that that those words get thrown around a lot and i think it's very um it's a very complex statement for a lot of people because what does that mean you know and i think to break that down uh to the simplest form is it's leverage right you're able you're able to make the maximum you're able to make um the maximum positive effort with the minimal negative impact um and also that that allows you you know if you have good data and this is something i've actually noticed you know a lot of people don't know we call this data hygiene but a lot of people don't know that even when you get it from like ivan's for instance and and i don't know if this is the fault of the carrier or ivins or whatever but like a renter's policy from safeco this is just one instance downloads as a homeowner's policy right so now it makes it very hard for you just in that one instance if you're a personalized carrier if you don't know the difference between your renter's policies and your homeowner's policies because they blur somewhere they kind of get you know smashed together and just thrown through the to the uh you know the data channels um that obviously that's one instance but you have you know probably 50 to 100 of those throughout um your agency and and that by itself without you doing anything wrong makes it difficult to to accurately track what you're doing in your agency and that's just one metric you know and so then there's the human error element of that where people get lazy they don't leave you know they don't enter the right information they don't do what they need to do uh and that and and i will vouch for that i mean obviously there's a there's a level where you can't you can't use you can't use data if it's not good i mean you can but it the the the less the less clean it is and the less accurate it is uh the more you just you're making assumptions and guesses and and and you could make the absolute wrong decision from what you might be able to pull from a report that isn't accurate and so uh it's it's a guesstimate at best so i i will agree with that it's it's you know it's a weird place we've gone because we're you know there's an element to insurance where which makes sense you know i have some friends that do a lot of risk modeling and stuff on the underwriting side and they're doing some cool startups um that i think will do really well and and so technology obviously is changing the way that that's done the landscape of how we actually predict uh risk and hazards and things like that uh that's gonna be awesome because that's another side of coin that we can't control but if carriers can obviously the the pr they're gonna be able to you know accurately model what they need to charge in premium not based on you know not based on things like a a a an early effective discount or whatever it's going to be based on actual behavioral data from from from the prospect side right so there's gonna be such stuff on that side of coin that agents don't directly influence uh but will influence our life and then there's a side where we can have you know because we're field underwriters there's the side where we can have some influence on on how we track our prospects and our clients and then that we use that to to find out because that's one thing that you mentioned uh just a simple win that an agent could have if they had clean data is they can know the type of ideal client in their agency or or their most profitable type of client in ages this is one small win an agency could have where if an agency knew because they had clean data what segment of the population male female what age bracket right what kind of jobs they have where they live zip codes things like that you can get very granular on who you should or potentially shouldn't be targeting and it makes it a lot easier to win a client if you know i mean i don't like the price so i came from captive side so i had to sell on value i'm used to that that it's a much more preferred flow for me but you know when when once you know that it's a it's a lay down sale price wise because the person has a carrier you almost always dominate they're in a zip code you almost always dominate you know they start to have all these metrics that are in your favor well why play the game on hard when you have the cheat code right and so that's kind of the the thing there where uh data does it definitely does help you and you can you can definitely win without it but um man it makes life harder think about how naive and silly we are as business people as humans as agency owners that we think that we're smarter than something else we say that's not what my customer wants my customer is that not that type of person i know who my customer is they don't like texting they don't like e-signatures or maybe they do or all my people like texting whatever it could possibly be it's funny to think that we have had a conversation with a person for maybe 10 15 20 minutes went to our computer did about 10 or 15 quotes came back called the person had another 10 or 15 minute conversation with them they download into our system and all of a sudden i know everything about them not the other million data points that are out there that are saying hey guess what this this person's kind of like this we our comp our management systems very soon better agency very soon we'll have it to where when you pop open your thing in the morning it will show you here's the 10 most likely clients to leave you and it's not mr agent or mrs agent what you did it's because of who they are that's what it is overnight they change things have happened their lives have changed they're doing different things out there and now that's impacting their life which we're trying to let you know is probably going to impact how you're going to sell them things or how you need to sell them things a 27 year old girl actually does need accident forgiveness and if she does have the uh mobile app that that uh for the drivewise or whatever you want to call it statistics have shown that people around her age in her city in her zip code her friends have these same type of features so not only can you lean on that to say hey your friends probably have that but it's also seen as an advantage to her these are things that we don't know about we never could know about that but there's a billion data points out there that could be telling us this stuff we have to stop thinking that we know everything because from here on forward machines and know a lot more than we ever will i think you bring up a good point i think one of the reasons why i i think you and i connect so well is because i think you and i uh we think a lot of like in a lot of situations but i also think that uh whether we're sitting down and having lunch or we're on facebook messenger or we're on a podcast we can sometimes push against each other on thoughts and ideas that we have and try to draw out an even better idea this sounds like a sandwich method absolutely now here's the bomb no no no no no no but i i do think because i think this is where things get lost in translation with a lot of with with a lot of people in our industry we say these things uh we have to have data we have to know our data we and i think no nobody in in their right mind says well that's dumb i don't agree with that um i think here's the here's the problem is sometimes i think data gets mystified too much uh and that we don't bring it down into simple practical terms here here's the here's the thing and i know you you know this after speaking to thousands of agents most agents i don't know maybe 80 plus percent of our workforce our industry force they they are not equipped for this stuff in 2021 they're not equipped for it they're they don't most people are an agency owners who are running between one and call seven people on their team between csr sales people va so however you want to labe it they're spinning a thousand plates already they've got to be this to this person this to that person they've got to do this task that test they've got to learn this skill they've got it and running an agency has evolved so much i remember with within the last 24 months and in that type in that time frame a lot of talk was is that the next higher agency should make is an in-house marketer and i agree with that i think that that is a smart hire the problem is is and the reason you do that is because the agency or the principal doesn't have the time the bandwidth the energy to also have to learn that very unique skill set and so you hire it out and what happened was as agency owners were hiring these interns or people out of community college whatever and people who really didn't know anything about marketing and they were slapping the the marketer label on them and they were getting essentially the same type of results people were having to learn on the job it wasn't it wasn't what uh you think in your brain oh i'll just hire an in-house marketing and so when i when i hear people talk about you've got to know your data you've got to you've got to know all the in what we say data let's just call really what it is information however information analytics knowing situational uh analytics on what happens you know if this than that type situations what what happens is is most agency owners aren't equipped for that not just from a bandwidth in their in their brain standpoint but from uh just a time like i don't have the time to learn it i don't have the time to understand it and so what i hear people talk about they need to know data i say yes absolutely you should know your data you should own your data i think that's without dispute but you should you should know all the data so here's what i think and i want you to tell me if you agree or disagree and i want to have a conversation at this i think that the most important hires that and we talk about where the where agencies are going to be in the next couple years i think one of the most important hires if you're looking at your agency as an radius the radius organization the same no matter where you're at in the circle and in the middle that's that middle spoke is the ceo it's the principal it's the agency owner and they're making that whole flywheel move but i also think on on each endpoint you've got to have specific people in your agency moving forward and i think this is going to be the difference between agencies that really thrive and survive going forward and those that are going to kind of be uh phased out and for for lack of their words or really struggle never really get traction i think they need to hire a real marketer and there's no order of importance here i think they all work together in that in that radius but they need to have a real marketer they need to have somebody who really understands marketing technology uh copywriting tactics strategy how to grow and i also think the agencies need to hire what is it the equivalent of a chief revenue officer somebody who's gonna or a sales manager someone's gonna really bring it work with marketing and bring in sales bring in revenue to the agency but i also think on that other part and everybody works together is there needs to be somebody who really is in charge of data analytics and somebody who's really going to be focused on knowing these metrics and giving this this information boiling it all down giving it to marketing so marketing can craft better messages giving it to their sales team or the chief rev the people in charge of driving revenue so they can sell more and sell better but then also presenting it to the ceo the principal so they don't have to sit there and dive in okay what does this report say and then okay and come up with all those percentage points that's where i think that the agencies are really going to need to go i think it's going to get tougher for one and two-man three-man shops or women's shops uh we are politically correct here on the better podcast but it's going to get tougher for those agencies because they're not going to have the marketing edge they're not going to have the data edge they're not going to they're having to spin all these plates and that's going to make them inefficient it's going to make them like a wheel in the mud i think the agencies need to start focusing on and looking for people who they can bring into the marketing team bring into driving revenue but then also bring in their agency who's their sole responsibility their sole job is to know the numbers know how to optimize those numbers know where the deficiencies are nowhere nowhere they can scale and then present that information to the rest of the team what are your what are your thoughts on that i've seen cass write down four times cast those ideas are spoken for bro no this is really good like like i mean god this is a really good conversation a lot of time i have a lot of the same conversations and this this really has me spurring so when you first said what would be the thing that you would that you would hire okay i have i wrote down my thing here i've got an article that i'm working on it's called the um well it's not it has a name yet but it's going to be something like the temporary cio i believe that the cios and i've talked to a couple of them right now that they work for large 2 000 person agencies and they're like data scientists basically these are the kids that you put in lockers in high school and you know duct tape to uh to trees these are the people who just they just live and breathe by the neighborhood you need your accountants and your cpas and we're not going to be able to hire them so the only way we're gonna be able to do that is you're gonna have temporary ones you're gonna have ceo or cios that will sit in on your meetings for two or three hours and you're gonna pay them a retainer okay something like that fractional yeah yeah yeah you're gonna there's gonna have to be something like that one of the things that um where we're gonna go with this on the end of what you're saying is is can they make it you're gonna have a big split between personal lines and commercial lines i think the days of those two being in the same house are gonna come to end i'm not going to say in the next three to five years i'm going to say within 10 years you're going to see those come to end we're going to have to start being professionals we're going to have to start independently rather than answering the phone we're here for all your insurance needs no doctor answers the phone and says hey how can we help you with your heart your feet your toes your knees what do you need we do it all no nobody does that you don't call a lawyer and they say so what happened yesterday was it a divorce did you get hit you got to work comp claim where you got a lawsuit we do them all no no one does that why do we consider them professionals because they know we know that they have our best interest at heart because they're not going to literally try to get money from us they're trying to provide us a solution okay so that's the key there so i think you're going to start to see personal lines is a rat race and you're going to have to lock down and be livid on analytics i mean totally you have to because the margins are so small the the motion of air is so so small you've got to squeeze them out so it's going to squeeze them out and then on the commercial side i'm going to be able to use and i say meme because that's more my angle i'm going to be able to use a lot more analytics to get me to the information that i need to get in front of the person i need a lot of that though in my opinion will be slower to come will be um it's not going to be a rat race and you're not going to cause your margins aren't so slim but also that type of scenario there's new age tactics but a lot of it's still the same it's still calling them it's still meeting them you know what i mean board meetings presentations proposals all yeah dealing with the board yeah you can't have those two that's that's two different agents is what's going to see so that's where i think that you're going to have to i agree with you dude i think the cio is going to be huge um our next hires would be that but uh once again we're more commercial focused we want a senior account manager one more producer and then i would hire probably a director of operations the director of operations allows me to we did that at uh we did that at good vibe squad and and dude it was i mean well that's what takes you to pensacola that's a huge role right that's exactly right that's exactly right yeah i mean i i here's here's where it boils down to and and it's part of my frustration over the last 12 or 18 months of of this really big buzzword of data i've gotten to the point where i get really annoyed when i hear people talk about it because it's become such a cliche word something that's so important becomes such a cliche word and you have a lot of people i in my estimation and look i'm not i'm not trying to you know pontificate or try to put myself on on any sort of pistol but i hear these people talking about like oh you have no business talking about this you know nothing about what you're just saying it because it sounds good and that's just a personal pet peeve of mine well i agree dude i think you said it i think i think this is the thing though nick and this is the interesting thing uh you know if you look at this everybody's crying i want two-way integration i want two-way integration right and it's interesting because it's like they don't understand that that blessing that's a double-edged sword right it has a curse to it as well you know we we lived in this age where you know the the compression of the industry while all other industries were innovating i mean let's let's be honest we've had kindness and political things that we were like the cuba during the trade embargo this industry was like we had we were just pro top he said cuba yeah six to midnight so so the uh you know the the problem was that we didn't have that innovation and everybody would get upset at that but that innovation gave us a bubble of comfort too because it was kind of the good old days we you know we we didn't have these factors for like outside industries did that were making it so you know you guys talk about the the margins are so small remember how the margins like like like commissions just like 20 like on a lot of carriers and stuff like that like they were just higher and we were paid more and stuff like that like that was those were standards well then commissions started to get reduced right people didn't like that you guys started talking about margin slimming that's that's i mean we see that heavily in the captive space farmers just took another rate uh uh commission decrease like these kind of these kind of pressures happen well the the the increase of technology is going to decrease some components of the human element right and the downfall of that is people don't recognize i want all this technology that technology has a cost right and and there will be some that leverage it and leverage it ten to one and there will be a lot of people that go under its tires the other direction and so it's like you know with the with the you know we're kind of going from a vacuum chamber into an atmosphere of our own with the new technology and everything we have and i think it's very important for people to understand like that this is something that we can't at this point stop the train can't stop stop moving we we really need to hop on it now what that looks like for everybody's a little bit different but but i think it's important for people to get out of their own way and i'm going to tie this back to what you were just saying nick you know where people need to start hiring marketers and stuff like that p like the agent that's listening the agency owner that's listening this going you know what i do need to hire a marketer i want you to shatter your perspective on what you think you need to look for i'm a marketer right i've done this for a few years i don't have a college degree i actually didn't graduate high school i don't talk about that a lot i paid i paid one of my teachers 40 to let me walk i bought the cap i got the i bought the gown i faked the whole process and i used that to lie my way into college which i then dropped out of i'm a marketer i am not what you would consider a traditionally educated person so you need to stop looking in your regular avenues your regular channels if you're hiring a marketer from a local community college that has a business and marketing two-year degree well they do it because they want to save a few bucks they're trying to well being cheap is expensive but also what you're saying here at the end is they don't make that person today and in our education system they just don't make that person well not only do they not make that person somebody you know the you know you start talking about the cios you start talking about the the marketers right and you will see this you'll see uh fractional marketers uh we have a fractional cfo in our marketing agency it's been fantastic like there's no like the stigma of like fractional anything is bad i think it's fantastic never heard of fractional we're we're not cool like you west coasters here in so fractional you have it like you talked about like a part-time cio it would yeah it never occurred right it's a person who specializes in that one thing they do that one thing they do it very well and they do it for a few people right and so the but the the cool thing about it is they're in they do their job they're out right it's like wow that was fast we hired uh we hired one for thrive sure uh they're an insurance cfo fractional cfo service and they they are great r d advisory uh out of new york and uh they're just great so they're like a fractional person that that is that has and and really if you're looking at a fraction all you gotta do is look do they already have work and have they been doing it for a little bit because a fractional person can't afford to survive if they're not doing a good job because that's all they do right so so the interesting thing is you'll start seeing fractional marketers fractional cios like you said fractional cfos like those are going to become the standard you don't necessarily have to have it in-house but this is the thing that you have to understand about that personality type i and most marketers like me need autonomy as much as we need the money we need autonomy so you can't have us come in sit at a desk sit behind a computer talking about no it's like you're gonna you're gonna notice part of that is your there's a there's a component where you're probably going to have to relinquish some control right like there's going to be differences in how you hire these people because like if they wanted to do the traditional route they would have but most of those people are kind of rogue in a degree i'm not saying all of them are but like you're gonna have scummy like preston you're gonna have to open up like your mind about what these roles look like right uh it's just something that i would highly advocate because if you're trying to fit the bill of what you think this person has been or should be compared to what this person actually is or will be you're going to be disappointed you're always going to be you're you're going to be chasing something and by the time that you finally get it the whole thing's changed and so it's it's really important to be open to that because um you know market like i know a lot of wonderful marketers and i think that they would like to have a consistent gig um however the expectations that are put on a marketer are very from a marketer's perspective unconventional like i don't need to be in an office like i don't need to be unrealistic it's unrealistic yeah yeah yeah that's that that's uh what great great conversation dude i had really never thought of that in fractional i like that yeah and so i mean getting back to this whole does it bother you jason as much as it bothers me when i hear when i hear all this data just become this buzz when i get it it becomes watered down and like wh n i hear people talk about it i go here's here's how i equate it we talk about data like i talked about really hot women when i was 13 years old in this sense in this sense you know i'm a 13 year old boy and i'm i'm dreaming about you know the most amazing woman on the planet and anybody who had any sense who was older than me would have looked at me and said nick you want to know what to do with it if you got it yeah and that's how i think most insurance agents are treating data right we're saying we need data you could say nick of uh yesterday dude you got to sit in that you got to send that clip right there to my team at ai dude that that was fabulous right well it's like you agents or agents are saying they're thinking about i need my data i need my data i want to own my data i need this data to do this and god bless them they're they're right they're not wrong right my first thought is is you wouldn't know what to do with it if you had it you wouldn't you wouldn't i'm gonna i'm gonna agree with you on that but i'm that's why i say you need to hire somebody who that's what they do yes well i think that that's we need to challenge people to think like actually sit down get rid of the devices grab a pad of paper and write down what do you want your data to do for you this is actually an interesting point like you know i'm obviously a chief product officer a better agency i have a lot of these discussions about product and what people want and things like that and and i hear the cries from the people we want integrations we want integrations and i say all right cool you want you want integration how do you want well we want a two-way integration okay cool what do you want it to do for you integrate okay what do you want to integrate two two ways what do you want to go two ways crickets and it's like guys like i i you know it's like i think there's an element to that too where it's like we want to get excited but it's like there are now i don't want to leave my management system and go into better agency and have better agency and come back in that's what i mean by two-way and i think that's what a lot of people well right but it's like specifically what what functions you know what i mean there's a lot of that's a lot that's a blanket statement you might not need you used to be an insurance agent though so that's that's why you guys are good at what you do is because you're able to like actually hear that dude say well i need two-way and you say why and he says i don't know that's what jason said and you're like well don't listen to jason here let me tell you why you may or not need it and that's why i think that you guys well well but but this is also and and thank you on that but but this is the other side of that coin and i just want to challenge people you start you're starting to have tech companies like better agency that are that want to listen that want to help you right and and i don't think we're alone in that i mean we've seen tarmaca they've moved fast they're pretty open uh lightspeed voice is always an open ear to people in the in the phone space right so there's definitely allies in this tech space that that are advocates of the independent agency owner and the and the and the users within the their offices um what i what i want people to do what would be very beneficial to you the listener of this is if you could actually we want to hear it and we want to help but if you could come to us with better questions too right it's like we get asked a lot of we get asked a lot of things uh we get asked for a lot of things and and i want to help you change your life i want to i think part of it comes down to you've got to know what problems you're actually trying to solve 100 percent okay so so let me answer nixalis's question about the data there's two places to look at data you can look it at as it as a practical and functional way which is what we're talking about here i wouldn't even know what to do with most of it i admit it right now i mean i would be like okay they show me things on neon and they'll put new things into our dashboard and i'll go holy i didn't even freaking realize that that would be a good idea right so there's got to be people smarter than me cass looks at it and gets excited for it on a monetary issue i get i get excited based on the fact that you can sell it i i mean it's it's being sold for a lot i mean uh lots and lots and lots i just bought uh maybe some of you heard me say this before i did but i just bought a new tv ironically it went out right before thanksgiving i mean that's good luck right if your tv is going to go out go out my wife thought that i got an app and put it on the damn tv to make it go out anyways uh so so i go buy this tv i mean i'm looking at this tv that's total 120 i mean it's the top of the line and i'm gonna walk out with it for like 780 bucks now it could have been like 900 if it wasn't because the holiday but i'm walking out with it for around 800 and i'm thinking this tv would have been so much more they want to give those things away to you they want to give them away for the cost because they want to sell the data that you use in that device now there's a lot of people saying well you wouldn't know what to do if you had a tv if you if you had all that stuff no i wouldn't but that's not why i get excited about it but 99 of the people out there you're right nicholas they don't have a damn clue what they're going to do with it and i really have never driven it down that hard as far as data i know that i have data and if i can create and have a different type of net to create different data not not not phone numbers that's category of data i'm talking behavioral data out there so that how did i get that phone number when did i get that phone number well those tvs are good for that when i can get that information and i can autonomize it and bring it together and aggregate it with thousands of other agents insurance companies want to buy that other industries want to buy that coca-cola wants to buy that that is a powerful thing has there been a use case and i'm not challenging this for disputing i hear i hear this a lot that people want to sell sell the data my question is sell to who and you mentioned insurance companies and other third-party companies has there ever been a use case that you know of where nationwide progressive travelers they've gone and they've done that has there been any precedent where they've bought that from an insurance agent or are you saying that this is going to open that door for that um the okay i'll answer it both ways it's opening the door and the door is open there has not the use cases are the companies are waiting to get the data i'm just wondering what the market on that is like it would probably be like a brown and brown or something like it would have to be a large agency because like you know data without like small small data pools aren't valuable you need you need a lot of data to be able to scale it and so i mean that's a hundred agencies a hundred dollars right if you can aggregate it that's a billion dollars or make up 700 million and well i i was just trying to give context to people who might be watching listening because i think that's that that was always been kind of a confusion uh a confusing point to me is people would say well i want to sell the data and i'd go cool to who right like who buys it yeah well that market's coming right it's not like we knew hey the market's here now let's build something that's where i think that this stuff is very intuitive it is it is right uh the thing and yes there are a lot of things that i know that i can't tell right now or i'd have people shoot me as soon as this thing goes goes live but so well so tell us jason yeah exactly i know yeah it's just that it's going to be i think the industry is being transformed right now going back to the very beginning of what we talked about we're all in this man i'm telling you man if you took us in 2010 and dropped us right now and funny we would be like what is going on not even close it would just be wild and i'm talking just in our industry i'm not talking about the the world right which would be crazy but dude it would just be it would be unbelievable so your question on your podcast back then would be like all right nick first question palm pilot or blackberry blackberry go okay so let me also talk about the monetary collision you're right that is a good one so right now we have manufacturers that then sell to wholesalers who then sell to retailers it's starting to already happen the these these these these um systems that are out there and that are being created are going to be the manufacturers so the manufacturer is actually the agent but the reason why i say they're the manufacturers because they're the one aggregating all of it and putting it into a way that can then be sold to the wholesaler no the assembly line which is going to be a third-party company who's going to come along and say i don't want to create all the infrastructure to get all that data so i'll just latch on to that company and then i'll grab that data and they sell it out to an our retailer who they package it and put it on the pallet and so what it does is that data now starts to come through so you can see company a is giving to b and company b is given to c because c doesn't want to put in all the r d that company a did but once you pull it out of the ground why you got to do that right let's just divvy it up so i think this monetizing of data that's what excites me that's what gets me besides the fact it does give me some pretty cool ass dashboards you know i mean well that's nice so so i'm actually curious too because that by that by itself jason i think only your masturbate because because like honestly uh you would get you're gonna get a fraction of the sale right um and you're not gonna get all of it obviously whoever whoever's wholesaling that data is gonna take a cut right so i'm just imagining this kind of ebay it takes a fee right so it's gonna be like that and so when you're when you're auctioning this this data off um you know it's going to be it's going to it's just like a bonus when you're part of an aggregator right well you had 100 policies with safego you're going to get your share of that overall bonus right and so um what you just talked about monetizing the the data for actual monetary gain not monetizing it as a sales tool um that's something only larger agencies can really get excited about or larger agency groups right so so my my my question to you though uh and i wanna i wanna pose this to you on an individual basis and like an actual practical for for your own situation um how do you get excited about monetizing the data that you have within a system like yours in in everyday situations i'm not talking about selling the data i'm talking about leveraging the data to help you increase the actual revenue driver that you currently have which is selling policies and premium how are you how are you leveraging the data in a way that everybody can benefit from individually regardless of their size me specifically in my agency yeah how are you leveraging data in your agency to help you increase sales and premium well first of all okay so i got a couple things but i want to let you know that it's been different since july since i've been on with neon salesforce varuna okay is like night and day one of the deals i don't know how we me and my team say this all the time actually all the neon pilot agents do and their their staff we don't know how we kept straight before this type of a system when you have things in cases and opportunities i don't want to go down that road but whenever i'm able to see cases and see everything that's going on in my agency actually everything that's going on and seeing how long how many um auto changes we have open still that we're still working how long they've been open who's working them why is it taking so long why when that person's working out of the house where it's working in my office is it different right because i think there's something that i i know people think that i'm nuts when i say this stuff but it's just the way that i think i think we like you because you're nuts i know i know sometimes the way that we look at you know sometimes we chase shiny objects sometimes when jason cass is making decisions i'm trying to make decisions if i need something to make me productive or if i need something to make me efficient those are the only two things that i really care about okay now i do care about other stuff but at the high level because efficiency is when i can do the same thing i'm doing now with less people right less resources less resources less people whatever as opposed to productivity is where i'm going to do more but with the same amount of people right and so when i look at this i'm looking at data to say and that's what a lot of people don't do when they're looking at it am i using better agency because i want to sell more because that's more productive which means that i need to be able to keep the same people or am i using it to become more efficient more on my service side right to where i can do more but i don't need to hire any more people because that's going to tell me where i'm going with that and i'm going to hopefully be able to then start to use data to amplify that using some of the characteristics that i'm trying to get now but the ones that we have today that's that's in the next year the ones we have today cases and opportunities and allowing me to here's the other thing when i send an email to my carriers it now times how long it takes for them to get that email back to me i can now say like why are all these underwriters get returning this back to me in an hour and a half but dude nationwide it takes your your service team two days to get back to me and actually i can tell you exactly how long that took to get back to me the last thing that i think that we're going to see which is huge and and i'm going i'm still staying in your question preston is um did you want to summarize that i want to summarize that last point for the jason's talking about is is the data in that example allows for accountability between uh an agency principal and their staff and an agency and their and their carrier partners that's exactly right yes yes nobody is over anybody anymore we're all on the same level playing field that's what data does for the independent insurance agency it puts us on the same level playing field as the carriers and the vendors now they can't say oh i mean the vendors your vendors have you guys know this i'm just talking to the audience but our vendors have always been keeping track of things that we're doing right they we already already know things about us that we don't and our carriers they're dealing with a customer that we deal with too so that's like we're it's like we both are married to the same person but we don't get to know each other each other are doing and this is kind of weird kind of lets everybody know what they're doing with the with the data but i think that whenever you are taking this data on a productive or efficient level that's where it's going to help me more i feel as if i can be a lot more efficient specifically with cases and opportunities opportunities are more sales driven so it'd be more a bit more cases but i can i can be i can be um with cases i'm allows me to say can we do um could we use the same amount of p or can we get the same amount done but with less people and that's been proven true with marble or with uh marble box i had four people now i only have two i've been able to able to drive that in ways that i couldn't drive that stuff before to see how many cases is this person doing versus this person and that relationship between efficiency and productivity is it's it's kind of like you know it's it's when one goes up the other one can as well so you know when you're they're very parallel so if you're more efficient you have more resources to devote to whatever you want which can increase productivity or you could essentially put that back in the bank it's called protofishit there's actually no word i've looked it up in google i've spelt it six ways so it's a wor that cass created co-deficient it's where you get more by doing less with less that's yeah no and that's good and so you know you had mentioned some about opportunities and you were like well that would actually be cases but i would actually beg the differ you know one of the things that we've seen with better agency has been really cool is um we've seen people like with our opportunities and whether our sales pipeline and everything functions is um the level of automated support it provides an agency is not only does it increase the scale of sales that they're able to achieve but they are actually doing far less than they've ever had to do before and so you can you know if you get the right workflow you can actually do more in less like that's a very realistic reality you know and that's one of the things i love like i was saying earlier you know if you leverage the right technology and the right data uh you're gonna have you know you have the potential for a ten to one multiplier or greater um you know that that is not uh that kind of scale is not i want you guys to to honor me a little bit would you i mean i just need it create a process with better agency and then name it like the proficient process right where you're doing more with less make a deal we'll do that but you've got to be a better agency user all right that's tough i can't so yeah no we're just kidding can i say something to that can i say something i think can i say something today you're gonna have to be can i say that into that that is actually going to happen and it's going to happen relatively soon travis and i were talking about this two weeks ago because with neon you have the neon marketing cloud and then you have base it it's awesome but uh you guys wrote an article like what is it driving the ferrari to the grocery store yeah some oh dude this is this is like driving the 500 million dollar uh yacht to the next door neighbors i mean it's ridiculously it's so awesome but a dude it's a lot of money i mean it's a lot of money it's not the neon one it's just the one that you're getting from salesforce but then it's been adapted for neon right it's a lot of money um i'm not saying that that has to be a huge driver but when we're looking at what we do for our agency for going after wales and and we need some of that automated marketing on the personal line side to just kind of automate that better agencies probably where we're going to go there's no doubt about it i think that's a fantastic spot to put a capital or a period on that you've heard it here first jason cass is going better agency folks no it's going to hook into my varuna absolutely look into something so yeah salesforce jason cass i want to tell you thank you so much for for being on the better podcast today i think this was a riveting conversation i think anybody who listens to it um you know you're going to come out hopefully not you're going to come out less confused you're going to come out with the plan you're going to figure out okay this is where my agency needs to go in in the future if i'm going to survive and thrive as an agency owner in this industry that is ever-changing i've got to survive and thrive and change myself so uh thank you so much for being on the better podcast present any last words uh no jason it's always a pleasure man we had a lot of fun in this hour we did we did all right guys make sure if you're not subscribed that you subscribe to the better agency podcast you can do so on any of the popular podcast channels or if you're watching here on youtube you can subscribe to the channel and we will see you on the next episode